“The salient features of our condition are plain enough.  We are grown men, and are without a trade.  In the labor-market we stand ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each day.  We are thus in the lowest grade of labor.  And, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions.  It is all the capital that we have.  We have no reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a ‘reserve price.’  We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger.  Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our labor.

“Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price.  The gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business.  He has sole command of us.  He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the debris is cleared away.  In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of.  If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take our places.

“We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,—­that we have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest.  He has paid high, and he must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we can.  From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor.  We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer.  There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end.

“And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.

“All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren, hopeless lives.”

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain.  And why is this so?  Is it because they are so dirty?  Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that.  Is it the insensibility?  Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies.  Is it the poverty?  Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career.  Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?